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  • Essay / A critical review of Watkins & Thompson's research into British Sign Language

    Communication is a key foundation of life. Therefore, the effort by members of British society to create a world in which everyone could communicate regardless of their physical impairments sparked the creation of British Sign Language (BSL). The language is specifically aimed at the deaf and mute people of the country. Although some researchers have concluded that the first users of sign language in the United Kingdom used fingering in the 16th century and the centuries before it, British Sign Language was created in the 18th century. One of the most important changes that language has undergone is the contrast between the understanding and production of signs. Research psychologists have worked to advance language by bridging the gap between fingerspelling and lip reading. For example, Freya Watkins and Robin L. Thompson explored the aforementioned aspect in “The Relationship Between Sign Production and Sign Understanding: What Control Reveals.” The research has been incremental, but the major challenge is understanding its credibility. As a result, the analysis delves deeper into aspects of credible research such as its context, objectives and content and how well it addresses them. It also explains how certain aspects can be improved. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay The two researchers' masterpiece delves into hand configuration and visual dominance. Its main focus is the correlation between sign production and sign comprehension, the former being the independent variable and the latter the dependent variable. The main hypothesis of the study is that a difference should exist between right- and left-hand signers when processing motor feedback, which occurs in the comprehension process, regardless of processing signs. used by both subjects. Despite this, there were two other hypotheses (Watkins & Thompson, 2017). The first is that if most research subjects displayed excellent performance with right-wing signers, a frequency effect would explain this result in sign comprehension. The second asserts that if performance in the case of congruence surpassed the right hand sign, it would highlight the active role of the production system in understanding. In doing so, she focused on eliciting results from hand dominance in a picture sign matching task. supplemented by right-handed signers (RHS) and left-handed signers (LHS). The evidence provided by the researchers supported their hypothesis (Watkins & Thompson, 2017). Natives on both sides, that is, right and left side signs and non-natives, reacted faster when they perceived the right side rather than the left side. Additionally, left-handed signers had a propensity and exhibited exceptional performance toward congruent hand grasping, something that correlated with perceptual motor speech. The theory proposes that people perceive phonetic information and gestures recognized by distinct specialized systems in the brain that are skilled at detecting the intended gestures of the articulator; these form the basis of phonetic categories. The structure contains various overlapping connections between gestures and auditory patterns. As a result, the unit mediates between the acoustic stimulus and speech perception which localizes the sound. The methodology is one ofmain elements for carrying out the research. The researchers used forty-three deaf participants who were fluent in British Sign Language. Twenty-one of the subjects were female and twenty-two were male. Their average age was thirty-three, while their age range was nineteen to fifty-nine. Since the type of hand they used is important to achieve effective results, they divided them into right and left signers. Twenty-six of them were right while the other seventeen were left-handed. They also used language acquisition as characteristics to define the topics. Although all research participants had at least twelve years of exposure, eighteen had acquired it from birth and twelve had been exposed to British Sign Language through acquisition. The basic materials used by the researchers to conduct their research are black and white line drawings associated with British Sign Language. They also used three categories of sign stimuli as follows: 2HA (n = 59), 2HS (n = 80), and 1H (n = 80). After setting up the experiment, the researchers developed the procedure by which they could manifest the results claimed by the hypothesis. The procedure consisted of participants using the shortest possible time to accurately determine whether an image followed by an ideogram in British Sign Language referred to the same object. They had to give their yes and no answers by pressing the J and F keys on a keyboard. The experiment, which began with ten practice items, presented stimuli using g E-Prime 2.0. All trials experienced by participants began with a cross fixation (400 ms). Next come the image (1000 ms) and the video sign. During the research, researchers were forced to discard the results of several participants. They excluded three due to errors that existed in data collection and one due to accuracy issues, that is, the participant's accuracy level was less than seventy percent. Based on their results, the researchers concluded that use of the right-handed model served as an important indicator of accuracy in the sense that study participants performed exceptionally well in the right-handed model while doing everything correctly (Watkins and Thompson, 2017). They also considered a comparison to determine whether the Indigenous or non-Indigenous model was a factor in the response times of participants in their analysis. In doing so, they concluded that native speakers were quicksilver in their response to right-wing signs, proving the fact that it is a dominant sign due to its prevalence. Research on British Sign Language carried out over nearly one hundred and sixty years has concluded that most users of this language are right-handed since they represent seventy percent of the total population. Despite this. Perelle and Ehrman, 2015 suggest that there is a variable difference in left-handedness between different cultures. Regardless of the type of sign (1H, 2HA or 2HS), the retention time is generally faster for identifying and understanding signs intended for right-handed people. These results imply the role of the production system. The study meets various aspects of authentic scientific research. He revealed all the parties that financed him to give his audience the opportunity to analyze whether or not he was linked to third party interests. Funding came from the Birmingham Fellowship awarded to Robin L. Thompson at the University of Birmingham. It is also a peer-reviewed work that meets the.2017.03.019